Gretta Van Riel’s Audience First, Product Second Framework For Success

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to the Female Founder World Podcast. is Jasmine. I'm the host of the show and the creator of the Female Founder World universe. We have a very special guest on the show today who I have been trying to get onto this program for Greta, two years? A long time. Potentially two. Had to fly to Melbourne to make it happen and here we are. You are now entering Female Founder World with your host Jasmine Grinsworthy. I've got Greta Van Riel who is a multi-time founder, influencer, expert. What else have I missed? Online course instructor. There you go, teacher. Part of it, yeah.

0:38Yeah, you are the one of those OG internet entrepreneurs for the influencer marketing age and the ultimate person, I think, to teach to this topic. I want to start right at the beginning of your kind of founder story because I think it's shaped so much of where you are now and how you think about influencer marketing which is going to be one of the main things that we talk about talk me through your first business and how you got that started I love this story yeah well so I started my first business back in 2012 and it started alongside the I guess very early stage growth of Instagram so we were always like an Instagram first business once we realized we were actually a business within itself.

1:24It very much started out as a side project. It started really organically, I think. It was very much the detox era, I must say. 2012, very different time to be on the internet. Very different time to be a young girl in the space. So I think like, and it's the same with all of my brands, they were very much the stage that I was at personally at that time as a 22 year old girl um and very much scratching my own itch at the same time so I had been yeah doing I guess like lots of different sort of like detox programs cleanses and realized that like a lot of the ingredients that were in like the tablets or like the potions that were full of preservatives and things from the chemist or wherever else we were getting them from it came in like a much more natural like herbal form so I had swam really competitively all throughout high school as well so I knew quite a lot about nutrition I'd always been like a big tea fan as a whole too so I was like I could literally make what is in this in a completely you know organic form without preservative without you know the hidden nasties either and improve the formulations as well with you know some of my favorite blends too like yerba mate which is an Argentinian herb.

2:43So started mixing up and blending my own Titox blends and yeah, colleagues were using them, friends were using them and I was just making them for everyone, you know, just because I wanted them to do it with me. And it kind of got to the point where I was like, okay, I can't just keep making these for everyone. It actually is quite costly to create. I was like, how can I ask people for money? And I was like, okay, I'll make a website and I'll, you know, I'll start to sell it. And then, you know, if everyone - Was Shopify around then? Shopify was around then. Yeah. So I literally Googled how to create an online store or how to make a website, like to sell things, some sort of really crude sort of wording.

3:30I had no idea what the word e-commerce even was then um and yeah Shopify came up and I created our website in I think like a day a pretty big Sunday and we launched it I we I I love that still at that stage I'm so not used to saying I now um I launched it that night and we had four sales overnight I posted on an Instagram account I'd followed like a bunch of friends and friends of friends um and yeah four people purchased and I was like what in the world um where did they come from and I was like well must have been Instagram that's the only place I shared it uh so I was like I think basically from day one I was like okay well the way to get more people to buy more tea is to grow our Instagram account.

4:20So we just started, um, we again, I just started getting home. I was, I was still working a nine to five at the time. It was my first job right out of uni. And yeah, I just started like literally just following every single person I knew, then every single person that they knew. And it was still the early kind of wild west days of Instagram, where there were no rate limits. And because our account kept growing, people would be like, what is this larger account now following me this is you know strange um and they'd be much more likely to sort of follow back so all I would do is yeah grow our Instagram account and the brand would grow concurrently um so basically that was oh it all happened really really quickly that was probably all within the first you know few weeks sort of thing um and we started well very lean again not that I knew what the word lean was uh I actually had$24 in the bank at the time because I was very much just living paycheck to paycheck that wasn't a concerning thing I lived at home with my mom uh I was about to get paid like a few days later as well and my mom still reminds me that I actually owed her$500 at the time too so maybe I had like negative 400 and something dollars um yeah thanks mom uh and yeah so we were doing kind of like a pre-sale model and again did not know it was called a pre-sale model but basically because I was working nine to five I'd take the orders during the week and then I'd buy all of the raw ingredients mix them up blend them package them and send them out on the weekend which is such a smart way to like prove out a concept even though you probably didn't know that's what you were doing at the time no I very much did not know that's what I was doing at the time but uh it yeah it worked really nicely so if there's ever any product you can create by hand I know it's very similar to the frank body story so um brie is my stepsister actually so they started creating it with the used coffee grounds from her husband steve's cafes so it was very much the same you could like mix it blend it package it up send it out they put theirs in craft bags by then and i think mine were in like these cellophane little bags i did not know what it looked like people were receiving in the mail it was kind of terrifying australia post is like oh we're just gonna check this one out this person sending random herbs and cellophane.

6:40We never got in. There was, yeah, there was no transparency. And you hit some pretty crazy milestones really, really quickly. What were some of them? Yeah. So within six months, we'd made over a million dollars in revenue and we were doing over$600 ,000 a month US by that six month mark as well. So suddenly around that like four to six month market really, really took off. And I think just a lot of the growth started to compound. we'd really started to scale things like our influencer marketing efforts at the time influencer marketing was very much like a person with a thousand followers yes was actually quite a large influencer and I think you know the largest sort of level influencer would be like someone with 10-15 ,000 followers at the end of 2012 would be considered pretty big at the time um i remember like a lot of the early stage influencers we worked with who now have some have over a million followers had under 10 000 followers and we grew our instagram account to over 200 000 followers in that first year which really really helped when it came to influences too because it was very much like if we re-shared what they created of us they could grow 10 000 followers just from us resharing that as well so it actually was that case a lot of brands try to say and we'll offer you this in terms of exposure still now and that's usually you know it's a bit less effective these days but back in those days the exposure was actually pretty critical so interesting I'm so curious so you get to this point where you're like okay we're doing some serious numbers now it's pretty early on still how do you go from that person who's like at your mom's house with 24 in your bank account just kind of trying this thing to then putting in place systems and professionalizing what you're doing to be able to scale like what is that point it yeah it was really interesting I mean because I didn't really have a background well I did not have a background in business my nobody that I knew had a background in business nor my family it was I was just very much learning sort of through trial and error and googling things and we were still manufacturing by hand at that stage wow okay I think we were sending out close to 20 to 30 ,000 orders a month by hand I'd moved out of home because mum couldn't deal with it being on her kitchen table anymore every night she'd be like clear the table for dinner I'd be like mom there's 10 ,000 tea bags on the table it's not happening um so yeah so we very much I think manufacturing was a huge one for us and I remember literally thinking how to Lipton do it like how you know clearly they're doing this in some sort of way that's how naive I was I literally I had almost no idea um and yeah we we found our first manufacturer in Australia um and then we started going down the bulk manufacturing path because our Australian manufacturer couldn't keep up with our volume either so we started looking into China and I did a trip to Hong Kong and I ended up moving to Hong Kong for a bit over a year after that a year and a half around on and off and yeah that's how we kind of discovered our first manufacturer which became one of our big big learnings as well okay talk me through that learning because i know that you've had a couple oh i've i've had many learning i always say that i've probably had i would say five million dollar mbas in my time and at least you don't make the same mistake twice yeah but there are lots of new ones to make oh there's oh there's so many more i'll probably be making five to ten more as we go um so yeah no that manufacturer we just started placing smaller orders with them it was all perfect it was great we were sending it back to australia for quality control as well getting it tested by independent labs in australia and it was all great so i was like okay manufacturing is you know it takes up a lot of time and energy and effort like doing all this testing we really need to scale faster we keep running in and out of stock I was like what if we ordered like you know around like a year's worth of tea all at once and we placed an order for 1.3 million dollars worth of tea and it all seemed fine the manufacturer of course was like yeah of course we can do that of course we can do that but really behind the scenes what the problem was is in China even contractually there's legally no amount of times that a manufacturer can subcontract out a contract so while he was making it in his original factory to begin with when he got an order of that size he was like well I can't so he subcontracted the next factory subcontracted the next factory until we're like five times removed from the manufacturer um not that we knew yeah this either but we received the tea i was back in australia by this point as well we'd actually stored it in a warehouse in hong kong for a little then it got sent to australia it got stuck in customs i think it cost 88 000 just making me feel sick i'm gonna have a glass of water it was quite sickening um and yeah so it got stuck in customs we finally received the product it was very exciting day came in through the office double doors um downstairs to our like warehouse area and we opened it up and literally the first thing that hit us was the smell oh my god it was pretty much like compost you could see things in it like there was metal springs in there like bolts there was all kinds of like it wasn't even worth trying to think about what to do with there was nothing you could salvage from it really um oh my gosh it cost ten thousand dollars just to throw it out as well when you've got that much you can't just drop it down at the tip okay I have questions I have questions okay I have three questions first of all like personally how do you get over that and like move on to the next day and not just sink into a heap that's my first question okay yeah I think you need to grieve the loss you've got to feel it like that first day I was feeling it it was a bit a kind of more frantic hysterical feeling of it I must say to begin with like fury and anger thrown in there there was some fury and anger I'm pretty sure we still have the recording because we thought legally we should record the call with the manufacturer when I spoke to him um and I think my voice hit notes it never has um because I was I was close to the manufacturer too like I'd literally babysat his daughter her before.

13:35Like I knew him, I built a relationship. I'd done all the right things. I thought I'd, you know, I'd play smaller orders. I'd placed a medium sized order. It was just once it got to that level of scale that they were unable to fulfill it. Um, and I'm sure he didn't really mean it either necessarily, but at the end of the day, that's who I contracted. So I definitely felt it, then I think it's just becoming solutions focused. So what always then helps me and what always helps me with any kind of lesson or learning in business is having that like lightning fast turnaround from, I feel out of control.

14:14I feel overwhelmed. I feel, you know, scared and upset and vulnerable to, okay, I have a solution to this. And also I think a hard thing is to, So I was still, yeah, I was still in touch with friends from Hong Kong. And I called a friend up who's a lawyer there. And I was like, okay, what are we doing? Are we suing them? Are we doing this? Are we getting the money back? Like what's happening? And he was like, don't touch it. And I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, oh, well, you'd be suing a, like a Hong Kong entity, which is a Chinese company as a Hong Kong entity with an Australian subsidiary.

14:50You're going to be in court for the next five years. it will cost you probably double what you've just lost and you probably won't win okay so these are my next two questions how do you how did you fix it or what was the next step and you it sounds like you did all the right things before you placed this really big order but how do people who are now thinking shit i know i know there is a great way to avoid it happening okay i might just answer the how to avoid it part first because i can't say there's a great way and then lead off into something else. The best way is to check out through Alibaba and use trade assurance.

15:23So we had gone, you know, outside of the platform by this stage, we did meet through Alibaba in the first place, but if that had happened and if I'd transferred the funds via Alibaba, then I would have been able to show them that I didn't receive the product that I'd, you know, asked for. And they would have refunded the money through the platform. They have like ways to claw it back and things and their own insurance in place too so definitely alibaba trade assurance don't go outside the platform don't let the manufacturer convince you that it's better to i understand there's different transaction fees and things they're much better like paying a 1.5 surcharge is much better than potentially losing 1.5 million dollars so that is that's the clear solution um um going back to oh what did we and then how did you fix it oh fix it fix did you fix it absolutely not no we fixed it in the way of coming to terms with it like it was a loss you can't really do anything I just you know we wrote it off as a loss I think like on the on the balance sheet it was put down basically as theft or damaged goods in the end my accountant kind of worked it all out with the ATO.

16:37So we're like, okay, well, you know, slight tax benefit, not really. But I mean, like the biggest thing that you can do sometimes is cut your losses and move on quickly. And if I had been distracted by that for the next, you know, three to five years, and if I'd spent double that in legal fees and potentially still lost, I wouldn't be sitting here today. I'm pretty sure. Okay. So you've, you've built up your first business and then you just kind of kept adding on these new ventures and all of them seem to have worked really well what came next well I think a big reason that I did keep adding on new ventures was things like this kept happening with SMT so I basically um I basically had this like moment in Hong Kong one night where I was like freaking out every night I'd go to bed and be like this has all happened so quickly I now am 23 years old I live in Hong Kong I live in a service department in the Four Seasons in Hong Kong one of my team members lives in another service department in Hong Kong in the fourth like what is this it's not real life I would sit there staying up all night sometimes and just like watch a thunderstorm over Victoria Harbour and be like this is a movie this is not real this is well Hong Kong is La La Land as well anyway so it kind of wasn't real um and I kept being like everything has happened so quickly seemingly overnight that means that everything can go under just as quickly and fail just as quickly in my mind I thought that you know it can all be taken away just as fast overnight and it took until a friend of mine his name's Jacques and he was the head of one of the biggest turnaround companies in the world called Alvarez and Marcel or something they like help companies that are like losing hundreds of millions of dollars back to making billions again like huge huge company impressive guy and I basically said to him like exactly how I'd been feeling and I was like what if I lose everything and he was like Greta today is Thursday night if you lost everything by Friday what would you be doing on Monday and I didn't even think and I just said starting again and he was like exactly like what you're learning is repeatable.

18:53Like you could just start this again. And so that's sort of what I did. Okay. So what was repeatable and that you implemented into your next business? Was it drop bottle that was next or fifth watch? Yeah. Drop bottle was next. Yeah. Which was what? For people who don't know. Yeah. Drop bottle is a fruit infuser drink bottle. So basically a bottle that can infuse like just nutrients and flavor into your water sort of on the go um it was off the back of like a big popularity and trend health trend on instagram just where people were yeah adding like water cucumber whatever sorry water to their water where people were adding lemon or cucumber and those sorts of things to their water and i think they were calling it like a spa water or detox water.

19:40So I had this large network of Instagram accounts by then. Again, another diversifying risk thing. Talk me through what that means because I saw it in action and it was very clever. It was interesting. So again, it was very much like a risk aversion thing. Just like I started multiple businesses in different spaces with the same process, I started multiple Instagram accounts because our SMT Instagram account got hacked and deleted one night when we had 200 ,000 followers and we had to build it back up from nothing. It was insane. It was like hackers from the Netherlands. Um, and oh, well like the server was in the Netherlands.

20:16Who knows? Um, I don't want to blame the Netherlands. I'm half Dutch. Um, so yeah, basically we lost that Instagram account overnight and I was very much like, okay, like this can never happen again. And so we built an account network of probably like 10 ish key or core accounts, all in different niches, mostly, well like mostly the health niche but all different areas of that niche so I had one that was called detox tips we've still got that of course like went really well alongside smt and then I started one called detox water and that just absolutely took off like it had more followers than detox tips within like a couple of months I think it had I think within three months it had like 500 ,000 followers wow and what were you posting something like that water with fruit in it yes very groundbreaking stuff okay yes water recipes and so when you looked at that you saw that that account was taking off did that make you think okay i should create a product to serve this audience very much yeah so it was like very much that like audience first product second sort of approach and i sometimes refer to that as market product fit as opposed to product market fit like finding the market first and then yeah seeing the best way to serve that market and also crowdsourcing demand for products through that market you already have that audience you can use that audience to inform future products so when it came to like the fifth for example we'd put up four different you know watch styles or colorways and be like vote on your favorite and we'd put you know swipe up links that was swipe up at that stage yeah swipe up links to be able to vote and you know three might receive you know 100 to 500 votes and then one might receive like 5 ,000 votes and we'd be like, well, it's pretty clear what the winner is.

22:05As you're moving from one to two businesses, two to three businesses, what does your like team structure and setup look like? So all of the health brands, well, Skinny Me Tea, Drop Bottle and Skin Talks were all under the health boutique banner. So that was a group of brands. We also structured it so that any email signups, because it was owned by the group, any email signups could be shared amongst the brands legally which worked really well and meant that you could really just launch other brands off the back of the same lists and then the fifth was a separate entity because I started that with my then boyfriend at the time so I had a co-founder there and so that was entirely separate we had a pretty separate team my team still serviced the fifth from early days.

22:56So before launch to get it through to that sort of launch stage, like, you know, we use the same kind of like creative guy, for example. Okay. So now you also have the agency, Hey Influencers, because this is, you know, the formula that you've used to build all of these really successful e-commerce companies. And I want to understand, let's say that someone comes to you now and they want to launch a new product or they come to your agency, they want to launch a new product or they want to launch an entirely new brand what is the formula now yeah so high influencers is of course just the influencer marketing component of that but again that has been really like the growth backbone through collaboration uh you know early days we started to realize yes like you know we can grow on social as much as we possibly can as a brand but of course you know people are far more relatable far more approachable and like their growth you can just leverage on your brand's behalf at a really base level of course um so we started to collaborate with yeah just multiple influencers with i i would say that amongst the agency and my brands i've collaborated with over 50 000 influencers end to end so there's been some serious scale there as well and I mean the great part about an agency too is you really do get to leverage other people's learnings at scale and like a small brand as well can't afford to be spending what our cumulative learnings are as an agency either you'd need to spend millions in your first year to create you know the relative learnings that we're able to have you know from our last sort of year of business as well and I would say out of everything that you could use an agency for influencer marketing is the most important and that's why I continue to run influencer marketing as an agency because in influencer marketing it's not just what is working at any given time it's who is working at any given time as in who's converting exactly and so because we have that database of thousands of influencers that are proven to convert across niches, across brands and across clients and across my internal brands as well, that's sort of like the secret sauce at Hay.

25:11So that's kind of where the value is in using an agency for something like influencer marketing, as opposed to something like Facebook ads that is quite process driven. So of course, like the process is still equally important, but the database is a huge missing piece that a brand can't just access. And that's sort of our proprietary. tree if somebody wants to get started in the influencer marketing space let's say they're working with an agency or doing it themselves like what is the what I think that the big reason why people don't get into this is like okay it's gonna be super super expensive like what is the ballpark number that people should be like this is kind of the minimum I should be budgeting to start playing in that space I think everybody should do everything themselves to begin with yeah like I I think the more that you can be involved in at your brand the minute you take your hand off certain parts of your business is the minute that you lose control over those parts when you know when you are very lean like it really slows things down to not be involved in every part to begin with in your own brand and then you build a team and then you learn to delegate and then you know you learn to hire people who are better than you in certain areas and I'm not saying learn Facebook ads from scratch but I'm saying be extremely involved with you know say a single consultant don't use an entire agency for that from the outset, ideally.

26:28So yeah, I would definitely recommend doing it yourself to begin with. And gifting is not entirely dead per se. There's still the right people that will accept your product. Often even as like an influencer, I guess, like myself, like I'm more inclined to accept a gifted product than a paid collaboration because I think paid collaboration I don't have time for that gifted yep sure I'll put up some stories I'll you know if if I enjoy the product I'm happy to share it so if your product does align for people I do think there's still very much a space for gifting and there needs to be I think that influencers have gotten to this point where you know they see so much content on TikTok that about you know what creative rights should be xyz and I completely agree with that I think of course like creators put in the work and they're paid accordingly um but at the same time when you're first starting out in any space you need to you know build up sort of like a portfolio and if you do trust your results too and if you know you convert if you know you're going to do a good job for a brand and you can you know just chuck up a quick story that really did only take like a few minutes to film or a few minutes to put together and you know that you can create that content really seamlessly within your life and it'll take you five, 10 minutes and you don't mind that brand having access to your audience as a test.

27:57If they see that then converts, you could create a lifelong relationship with that brand too. So what we really use gifting for or low budget sort of activity is that sort of testing stage. So we might gift say 50 influencers product, Like if I was a new brand, I'm saying not as an agency necessarily, but we might gift 50 influencers product out of those 50 around, you know, we usually as an agency target about a 70 % completion rate on gifted. That seems high. It is high because we do have good relationships and everything. Good relationships, good processes, but anything, you know, around the like, I would still target around like a 50 % sort of mark.

28:42It is, again, harder as a brand to be following up and in any way sort of like pushy with an influencer that has been gifted. Of course, that is where it is a bit easier being a middleman like an agency because we get influencers even on a gifting basis to a greater deliverables up front, which I think like anybody can as well. My main tips with influencer outreach are to be as brief as possible. Just, you know, get kind of right to the point. Influencers don't have time. I know when I look at my inbox and a brand sent me like a big paragraph, I'm like, I don't even have time to read that, let alone do your collaboration.

29:17But if they've just sent, hey, I'd love to send you this. What's your address? I'm like, great. Looks great. Here's my address. And then we've started that conversation. As soon as they, you know, reply, there's already that like progress sort of bias created where you feel like you've already started the thing and you might as well just finish it. Yeah. And then they're like, hey, can you do this? And you're like, okay, sure. like yep I'll do it I've already agreed to the product now and I'm not saying that you know that's always the right way to go about it of course you have to be you know strategic it's great to build like meaningful relationships but at the same time I think a lot of brands get really deterred and a lot of early founders get really deterred when they send out messages and no one replies and it's honestly just at the end of the day you are a business you're a commercial entity it's a numbers game.

30:05To get 50 send outs as a brand new brand, you probably need to approach two to 300 influencers. And those first 50 are the hardest to get because once other influencers see you collaborating with other influencers or other creators see you collaborating, it almost serves as an add to them being like, this brand does influence marketing or they're influenced by other influencers. It's like macro and mid-tier influencers have this like trickle-down effect of influence whereby they influence your micro-influencers who influence your nanos who influence your customers um talk me through what those different tiers are uh so well everyone determines them differently we determine a nano as between like one to five thousand followers and they're kind of like more your content creators they're very like up incoming then your micros we determine as from 5 000 to 50 000 followers a lot of people put that up to 100 to me like just due to budget as well uh we just leave that at 50 000 because anyone above that is a much higher budget sort of activity these days as well um because on somewhere like instagram for example where the growth has slowed down like it has taken people years to build up to a 50 ,000 follower mark and they do have a more established audience as well so then the next tier up is that kind of mid-tier which we classify as 50 to 200 ,000 followers 200 to 500 ,000 is a macro and any one kind of 500 ,000 plus is kind of like more like mega or celebrity sort of I want to really make the most of your expertise today you've launched all of these different brands you've worked across a bunch of different other brands launching as well through the agency and through the work that you're doing teaching as well.

31:52And if you were starting a new product, you wanted to launch something in the next year or two, like what are the steps that you're following to make sure you get that zero to one traction? Yeah, no, of course. I think like, I think a way that I think of it is like, if I had to start like from scratch and build a million dollar brand again, as quickly as possible tomorrow, the highest leverage way that I would do that is through an influencer partnership. I would co-found the brand with an influencer. You've got that automatic audience. You can start to do exactly what I was saying earlier, start crowdsourcing demand for a product, working out with, of course, alongside the influencer themselves.

32:31And ideally, you know and have a great relationship with the influencer already. But if not, you can build that. And a lot of influencers now want to move more into the business space, but they don't understand or know exactly how to do that. And they need somebody to run sort of like the business and commercial side of that. so that basically all they've got to do is post and be sort of like the face of the brand and the rest is you working behind the scenes to do that um so like that is probably the fastest way to grow uh because you get that instant audience you get that instant trust and you're kind of leveraging off that pre-existing audience they've built for years smart so that would be how i would start a brand like from scratch very quickly but again yeah it's like again product is going to be like pretty much the most important first step of any brand um when you talk about i've also i've seen you like tweet this and i've seen people quote you on the the audience first product second uh like mantra to building something when you think about the way that i guess like platforms have changed to talk all that like how do you think the best way is to go about building that audience before you launch something let's say you can't partner with an influencer who already has that inbuilt community and following are you like go on tiktok but making yourself an influencer and then creating a brand are you doing the same kind of thing that you did on instagram but on another platform like how do you think about that now ideally you well yeah ideally you're going to be the brand basically you're like the best way to grow is going to be just like you have jazz like putting yourself out there as a forward-facing founder.

34:17Certain people aren't going to want or be able to do that. And that's completely fine as well. Audience doesn't always have to be like this huge, like, you know, a hundred thousand plus audience. Like it can be 500 engaged people. It's just finding, you know, those first early sort of adopters as well. I'm not saying that you have to I'm saying that it is like it's a lot easier but it is like a privilege I guess position to come from to have an audience first and build a product second I think the issue though with that approach and people listening right now be like might be like well I can't start nothing until I built an audience the best way to learn is by doing of course and getting out of your own way and not having this like number in your mind of like I have to hit a thousand followers to be able to launch my brand or to start to come up with an idea i don't want that to get in the way for people i'm um saying the way that like you can use audience to inform product selection and that sort of side of course you can still use product to attract the right audience as well but you still need to be getting that product out there in some way so if i didn't have an audience already if i did not want to put myself out there and be like a forward-facing founder, I would definitely work on the product selection side and start to get that product into micro or nano or micro influencers' hands and start to see that sort of like influencer reception as well and kind of go from there from an organic perspective.

35:53At the same time, you can literally put a, you know, you can literally build a great product, create a website, run ads, run paid ads to that website, and it will convert regardless or not of a community or an audience. No, you're not building, you know, much brand equity yet, but you can start out that way too. And honestly, money in the bank is more important than followers on an Instagram account. Yeah, I agree with that. I want to talk about the fifth and what you did to really build that business. It was a essentially a watch company, but you hit some incredible milestones really quickly.

36:28And you were really clever about the way that you got traction with the business. What worked and how can you apply those lessons to someone building business today? Yeah, of course. Well, I think a lot of the time when you're thinking about like differentiation in a business and how to make your product different and better than the sea of others out there. Like personally, I love entering a saturated market because there's already validation. There's already demand for your product. So if you can do it differently and better than the others out there which is actually quite simple a lot of the time as well literally just read the negative reviews find the commonalities in the negative reviews and fix them you can differentiate yourself but when it comes to a watch you can't necessarily reinvent the wheel too much you know it's going to have a round or a square or you know rectangular face yeah you could do a smart watch you could do a low-tech version of a smart watch like there's there's certain things have all kind been done before so it's hard to differentiate when it comes to I guess like functionality but when I'm thinking about product differentiation and kind of like ideation and my process for that I think of differentiation through design through function through time and through price and so the fifth was very much time-based differentiation so we were very similar to a lot of the other watch sort of brands out there were actually made in the same factory as like a lot of the big players um and our key point of difference though was yeah time uh so we were only available on the fifth of each month for five days which created quite a like a scarcity model and that scarcity also i guess like the scarcity um the scarcity increased demand while the exclusivity uh created through that increased perceived value so usually something is exclusive because it's expensive like a ten thousand dollar chanel handbag only so many people in the world can afford a ten thousand chanel bag or want to buy a ten thousand dollar chanel handbag um so that is why it's exclusive Whereas our watches were a pretty kind of affordable price mark.

38:47They were under the 150 Australian dollar mark, which is, you know, just over 100 US. So they were definitely affordable, but they were exclusive by time, not by price. That's so interesting. Can you also talk me through what those other, I think you mentioned four things that are kind of the differentiating factors that you think about when you're launching a new product or when you're thinking about developing a new product. What are some of the other ones? Yeah. So design could be, you know, anything along the lines of sustainability, it could be changing up colorways in a traditionally really old industry.

39:20Like I've seen, you know, a recent baby brand on Instagram that redesigned the like little baby ball up backyard pool and they've done it in, you know, terrazzo and they've done it in kind of like a grid and yeah, like really beautiful, like more modernized versions of like older brands. and there's just still so many that are kind of ripe for disruption. Most of the like kind of really big evergreen industries are so ripe for disruption. So like home products, pet products, car products, baby products. There's so many that you could change just simply through design. So that, yeah, design is a really great one.

40:00Functionality is just what we were speaking about earlier. It's the most obvious one when it comes to kind of like variations or differentiating your product from the others out there. So it's basically just finding problems with an existing product or finding pain points and solving those through functionality. So, you know, a really obvious example would be, and I think that so many brands have already done this, so I wouldn't be doing this one, but like, you know, leggings to the gym, people are sick of, you know, you do a squat and they fall down, you do a squat and they're see-through, you know, you can't, like they're not flattering enough whatever else so a lot of brands have already worked at fixing that one in particular but there are just there are just so many products out there like the kind of evergreen categories that i just said that still have so much room for improvement and you know brands have got really comfortable big old corporate brands have got really comfortable in their space and they're kind of just ripe for disruption so and then we've already discussed time so that's you know scarcity or exclusive or like that sort of like drop based model and then the last one of course is price so it's are you going for sort of like that higher like higher price higher perceived value sort of and are you going for that like undercutting sort of like more amazon end or like a middle range um like the watch industry for example i think like even the watch industry still has room for improvement in terms of there are watches that are like okay i don't want to say a disposable watch by any means but you wouldn't die if you lost your 150 watch um or there's like designer watches that are thousands of dollars there's very few watches that are in that middle ground like 500 to 1000 price point that would be like so special to somebody but not quite that designer level either so like there is white space in so many different industries if you take those sort of like parameters or levers sort of into account and start to think so like when I'm yeah I guess like thinking about a new product I might even table out with those headings design time function price and write down some ideas under each of those and it's just a really nice exercise that kind of brings out different ideas and then you can pick which you want to do you might even do one from each column this is so good so if anyone's sitting home they're like oh I want to do something but um I don't know what and now you have exactly the framework that you need to come up with an amazing idea well it's helped and the other really cool thing that we did recently when we just updated our start and scale course we just updated it with all new AI tools that can help you get everything done a lot faster very cool we just got chat gpt to put it in a table as well for us so literally and i love a table on chat gpt all i do is ask it to do things and then say and put this in a table with these headings and then i and then i can be like add this heading map it out for the rest so yeah just simply asking chat gpt say you want to create a you know a new pet bed how could i differentiate a pet bed by design time function price this is what I mean by each of these function is the most important to me and give me a table with 30 ideas wow chat GPT is your co-founder okay so now we are you've been an entrepreneur for this is your 12th year 12th year okay good thing I can count what businesses are you running like what does your responsibilities look like I'm so curious about like where you're right?

43:42You've got all these businesses, you've done all these amazing things. What does Greta do with her time in her businesses now? Yeah. So I've focused a lot of my time on building up the influencer agency over the last few years. We've got a bit of a sizable team there now as well, and some really, really great core clients. And we're just working on some different offerings via the agency right now. Agency to me is like, it's really great because we've been able to service and help brands grow alongside us. But at the same time, like agency is never going to be as scalable as e-commerce. So I think that from an agency perspective, the future for like a lot of agencies is going to be the online education space and some sort of mix of like courses and mentorship.

44:32So we're working on some different offers at the moment for a do-it-yourself option for really small brands that are looking to, you know, they're just starting out in the space and they want to be doing it themselves, but they don't know exactly what to be doing, just a step-by-step course. So smart. And a done with you service for brands that need a little more directional handholding or have had a little bit more growth, but aren't quite at the agency level of, you know, taking their hands off and letting us sort of for a bit so that's like the done with you sort of mentorship service so that's the offering with hay outside of that I've been doing a bit of investment and advisory I was on the board of Hydrolyte for a while and early stage investor in a few kind of consumer brands yeah one of them is called Eucalyptus and that was actually my first investment outside of my own brands and I don't think I'm ever going to beat my first investment I hate to say it's kind of put me off investing because they've grown to, I think, yeah, like I think the most recent round, which is I'm sure it's increased since then now too.

45:39This was a couple of years ago was I think a$450 million valuation. Wow. And I had bought in a seed sort of round as well. Good for you. Did some advisory with them too. It was very nice. I was like, wow, investing is great. You don't even have to do the work yourself. This is gold. um no I think if I if I got too into that I would lose everything that I made out of that so yeah I don't get too ahead of myself there um but I think my investment thesis is if I wish I could be a co-founder of that brand but I don't have the time to be I'll invest so that was sort of what I thought there I was like god I would love to do this with these guys but you know I don't necessarily I can't take everything off the table and who knows if they've even wanted me to be a co-founder.

46:27So that was sort of where I was at. I was like, I can't do it with them. So I'll put money into it and do it alongside them. Amazing. So that's from that perspective. And then I have my course with founder. So we've now had over 25 ,000 students go through that course, which has been absolutely incredible. That's why earlier on in the episode, I was like, what else do I add to the little list? And I was like, course instructor. Cause honestly, it's one of my proudest roles that I've got to play so far in the business world outside of mother. So yeah, I absolutely love teaching. My sister and my stepbrother are both teachers, actually.

47:05It's almost more of our family profession. Well, half our family are teachers and half are entrepreneurs. So there's Brie and I that do. And then you're just like crossing over both now. Exactly. Love that. Exactly. And so is Brie, actually. They just launched a course through Lilo. Oh, amazing. What's that called? Is it an influencer? A branding course. Branding course. Very cool. So that's sort of what I've been spending the majority of my day to day on. And I am currently working on a new e-commerce venture. I don't even feel confident to say, well, not confident. I don't even feel, oh, I don't know how to put it.

47:41It's very early days. and I feel nervous to say it because I don't know where I'm going to get the time from. Yeah. But you know how it is. Commit to it on the show and then now you're committed to it. Well, yeah, let's hope. Yeah. Although that can cause a fake dopamine spike. Yes. If you say you're going to do something, it can feel like you've already done it. And you're like, there's the dopamine. I'm done. I don't even need to do that. It's like maybe like, I'm going to do an Australia tour for my events. And then I'm like, shit, I actually have to fly to all of these places and do all of this.

48:10Yes. Leave my baby for a day. Leave my baby for a day. Greta, the last thing I ask everyone who comes on the podcast is for a resource recommendation, something that has been helping you as you've been up-leveling and building your businesses and that you think other people should go and check out. Yeah. So I mean, two things that I use, two apps that I use on a daily basis to kind of learn and upskill quickly are just the book summary apps, Blinkist and Headway. I think it's called Headway. I don't know Headway, but I know Blinkist. I get all of their ads. Headway's new. It is Headway. And I like Headway too, because it has kind of like visual infographic style summaries of books too.

48:48If you're a very visual learner and I am quite a visual learner. Often when I read or listen to my Blinkist books, I've read and listened to them at the same time. So I listen to the blinks as I read the words, because then I'm getting that audio and visual and I'm more likely to retain. The other thing that I do is write down an action item at the end of each blink if possible yeah not always I won't always relate directly back to what you're doing and it's not useless information either if you don't create an action off the back of it I just think it gets you thinking about your business more while you're listening to or digesting sort of like learning material my favorite book of all time though I must say and the book that changed my life in business the most I wouldn't have started the fifth watches without it is influence the psychology of persuasion by robert cialdini okay we'll put it in the show notes for people who want to go and download that now yeah no that's a amazing one it has the 11 different principles of i guess like consumer psychology like reciprocity social proof uh scarcity those sorts of but just applied really well to examples and yeah i don't think we would have started our model for the fifth which was that we only sold the watches on the fifth of each month for five days or had the success that we had off the back of that we had our million dollar day with the fifth watches um as well I don't think I would have started that if I hadn't just read influence on a plane amazing I love that I could talk about this stuff with you all day but we are at time very sadly where can people find you on the internet people can find me on the internet they can find me on instagram i'm greta there just my name uh and yeah that's about it probably amazing okay thank you so much for coming on the show greta this has been one of my favorite episodes so good oh thank you so much quick shout out to all of our business bestie subscribers if you are loving this show and you are building a consumer cpg or e-commerce business or you're about to build one this membership will give you access to the people experiences and the tools that you really need to build your dream business.

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